“... punter, took ten years to write. It appeared in Australia in 1974, when Murnane was 35.A self-mythologising work of fiction, Tamarisk Row enfolds horse-racing, Catholicism and sin into the birth of its hero. Clement Killeaton is conceived the evening his father’s horse Clementia wins her maiden race, netting him a small fortune. Jean and Augustine ...”

“... fuzzy and so richly textured that they seem almost rotten. The stories move in such a private and self-sufficient way that they seem to leave no room for interpretation. It isn’t immediately clear how Schulz expects a reader to make contact. The clue is in the stories’ ambiguous relation to reality. Schulz is very fond of the seemingly innocuous word ...”

“... example – may be abstract, but they are not inert: they can provoke acts of violence or heroic self-sacrifice. From a philosophical point of view, the practical power of moral concepts has always been a bit of a mystery. Plato attributed it to the intrinsic attraction of the idea of the good, while anti-Platonists invoked long-range calculations of ...”

“... death in 2014, when a full collection of her poems appeared. Tonks loved Baudelaire in the same self-conscious way the young Patti Smith loved Rimbaud and Tom Verlaine loved his namesake. On the centenary of his death in 1967, she lay down next to his effigy in Montparnasse to confirm they were the same height, the king and queen of a rainy country.What ...”

“... that ‘seemed to be focused not on poems but on readers: they presented poetry as a species of self-help, a tool of personal growth like any other, valuable as a plumbable well of advice, reassurance and emotional uplift.’ Bucknell says that O’Hagan, along with other critics including Robert Potts and Mark Ford, saw this phenomenon as part of the ...”

“... at any point in the composition of the lines. Keats was a Romantic, an artist much concerned with self and selfhood. The sheer beauty of his fair copies seems a revelation, if not a celebration, of what he considers his own best self.At the other end of the spectrum, consider Twombly. Born in Lexington, Virginia in ...”

“... conditions for the uproar over the Gender Recognition Reform Act, which would have brought in self-identification for trans people. It was passed by the Scottish Parliament in December 2022 but subsequently blocked by Westminster. The bill, which was supported by the large majority of MSPs from all the mainstream parties at Holyrood except the ...”

“... to have around, which is the role I vaguely thought I filled.’ Motion calls this a ‘typically self-effacing judgment’ but it’s also a bit of a self-deluding one. It’s a short step from the jackboot to the book-jacket and by all accounts Larkin the librarian could be a pretty daunting figure. Neville Smith ...”

“... of the European Union since the end of the Cold War, and occasion for more or less unqualified self-congratulation, has left one inconspicuous thorn in the palm of Brussels. The furthest east of all the EU’s new acquisitions, even if the most prosperous and democratic, has been a tribulation to its establishment, one that neither fits the uplifting ...”

“... retiring! Less of the stately homes, horses, hunting, landowners, the young drunk rich ones so self-admiring. But John was ‘trade’ – don’t let’s forget it – he had to push to get there. No ancestors, no crest-embossed look.8 The world came, large, wild – he met it, like all loners, with that genuinely troubled ‘lost’ look. Further ...”

“... through life whipping itself until the blood oozes the chair just sits in a field of snow quiet & ...”

“... whose the powerThey are freezing to deathignored for now by the vicious hirelingswho blunt their techniqueson Arab prisonerstheir every translated plea a rusethey perfected in the mountainsand caves. Don’t be fooled.It’s rule or be ruled.You stupid sentimentalistswith your retro-neo existentialpalaver it means nothingtu-whit tu-whoo I’m singi ...”

“... if I were a flesh-eating flower, Whereas actually I’m originally from St Louis. The performing self opens the stage door. I start my act. I feel like running for office. I feel like riding a fixed-wheel track bike for the simplicity. You’ll play the viola And I’ll play myself. Komm, süsser Tod Comes out of my mouth Like a tail coming out of a ...”

“... to be her. All of itso lived in and lived among,so endlessly taken in by eye and ear,a record of self-sufficiency,historic click click no longer true.Deeded amateur landscapes, a printupside down, tweed linoleum in the kitchen,a foursquare Fifties desk.A lifelong orientation to light and colour,optimistic as a flower, or better yet, a leaf.Consolidated ...”

“... Samuel Huntington, the Harvard professor and self-styled defender of Western civilisation, has been a dominant voice in American political science for thirty years. Roughly contemporary, as a Harvard graduate student in security studies, with Henry Kissinger and Zbigniew Brzezinski, Huntington failed to achieve their spectacular level of success in Washington, although he did rise to a second-tier position in the National Security Council under President Jimmy Carter ...”